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Hvergelmir opened her eyes onto white noise.

It was like that, anyway, in the way that it felt. Like most human beings, her usual experience of using her eyeballs involved a context that involved various objects cordoning space off into various discrete sectors. For the most part, looking involved ground and sky and scenery, and most of it all quite different. Opening one's eyes and finding nothing but star-speckled space as far as the eye could see was similar to opening your eyes in a pitch-black room. You had the sense that your eyes were open, and yet simultaneously closed -- or, at least, not functioning. She looked upward, where more sky undulated relentlessly, and had to grab onto Tara's arm for support briefly as vertigo overtook her.

Space. True, unbridled space.

"Oh my God," she marveled, her voice faint and awestruck. "Oh my God."

Then, after a few seconds, her face started to relax. Then, gradually, her gasp morphed into a smile, and then, from there, a smile became a quiet, growingly delighted giggle. "Tara," she said, afraid to move but still beaming, "You did it, didn't you? You really, really did it."

Laney, who was naturally inclined to believe Tara could master any situation, took her friend's act of nonchalance at face value. She turned around in a slow circle, taking in her surroundings as she listened. There was Tara, in her own strange costume -- Hvergelmir automatically smiled, seeing her -- and turning a bit farther, she could see tall stone gates, and in the distance beyond them, a single, desolate-looking building. To the other side, space opened up wide again, and around to the mosaic-to-rainbow bridge, and then she was back to where she'd started.

"What is this place?" she asked, the first question that sprang to mind. Then, before Tara could answer, she tacked on, "And what are you? What am I? How did all this happen? Oh! Oh, and what were those things that attacked us?"

"Reincarnated," Hvergelmir echoed her softly. "Inherited. But why here, I wonder? Well, I mean, not here here, but, you know -- why Destiny City? If these things happen for a reason -- if people are born time and again with magic powers, and we're meant to be protecting things -- if this watchtower's what you're supposed to be protecting, or my wellspring, which is -- hmm. Where is it? That's a question, I suppose. Anyway, it's certainly not in DC. So -- if everything that's happening is happening because there's something we still have to do, something we didn't do way back when -- what's so special about Destiny City?"

Other things stuck in her head. Something went wrong. War broke out. She decided not to voice her questions on that, but they rattled around in her head nonetheless. What went wrong? Why were there warriors before a war had ever broken out? And what kind of warriors were they if monsters managed to kill them all, just like that?

Instead, she focused on following Aquarius to her outpost.

With concentration and attention, Laney found that she could put her mind to facts about herself she didn't understand, and some of them would come to her as though she'd always known them and had simply never given them much thought. It was like discovering that one had a sixth toe on each foot and had simply never noticed it.

"I'm a knight in training. The Page of Hvergelmir," she explained, the odd name rolling surprisingly comfortably off of her tongue. "But it's not on any planet. It's just -- " She shrugged. "Away. Out there, I don't know." Her voice fell to a faraway whisper, the answers still only vaguely within her reach, still comprehensible in ways that were, themselves, incomprehensible. "Somewhere small. Small and special."

The great old sandstone building rose up before them, more and more imposing with their approach. Tara, she realized, had once lived here, a long time ago. Maybe not her Tara, but then, by the same token, maybe it was her Tara. Maybe something essentially made a person themselves across reincarnated lifetimes.

Either way, something that was a part of Tara now had lived here once. All Hvergelmir could think, looking up at the beautiful, dry structure, was that it looked terribly lonely. It was odd that thinking of her own charge, the one she'd described as small and special, didn't make her feel the same way. But perhaps that was the point.

"It's a shame old Sailor Aquarius didn't think to leave you a diary or anything, like the Book of Mazarbul. Or maybe just one of those IKEA picture manuals.

"How many of us are there? Senshi and knights."

Just as she had before, Hvergelmir found she could answer some of Tara's questions just by concentrating hard enough, drawing out pieces of knowledge that were either innate to her, or that were inscribed upon her memory from a life before this one, one she couldn't quite recall in full yet.

She raised a hand and pointed outward again, into the unfamiliar sky of space as viewed from Aquarius Outpost, far from Earth. Her hand was indicating a thickly clustered section of the ribbon that was the Milky Way, a point dense with stars and far-off mysteries. "At the center," she said, wishing she knew more. "Beyond where most travelers would turn back. Somewhere that way. Sorry," she said with visible chagrin, "I don't really know what that means."

It was disconcerting, knowing things without really grasping what it was you knew. It was like being handed something while blindfolded -- knowing that it was hard or smooth or heavy or glossy, without being able to say whether it was a television or a microwave or a humidifier or god-only-knew-what. A dead body without a cause of death was about as useful and as comforting.

And even Tara didn't know much. Tara, whom Laney usually looked to for answers to these things, who knew a billion scientific facts and who, when confronted with one of life's as-yet-unsolved mysteries, was always the one person who had a working theory and who didn't give up searching. Even she had come up empty-handed and was flying blind.

"It's kind of scary, isn't it?" she voiced her thoughts aloud. "Tell me I'm not wrong to be freaking out. I'm not wrong, right?" Her hands were shaking.

Tara always, always knew what to say.

The world was a big and scary place. Tonight, she'd fought monsters -- monsters intent on killing her! -- and she and Tara had overcome them together. The prospect of not being able to now proceed through the rest of her life attached to Tara's hip was a terrifying one; there'd be times when there would be monsters to be fought, and Laney wouldn't be able to count on her friend's reassuring presence at her side to bear her emotionally through it -- but she would have to muddle through it somehow. People were looking to her to do the right thing.

Tara thought it would be hard to screw that up. Laney knew herself, knew how bad she was at accomplishing anything -- anything of merit -- on her own. She wasn't so sure.

Without warning, Hvergelmir launched herself into Aquarius's arms and clung to her desperately. "Thank God you're here," she mumbled into Aquarius's shoulder.

It wasn't always easy for Laney to get out of her own head. She spent a lot of time there, mired in her own emotions -- and while outwardly, she'd always been the sort of person to bend over backwards to gain other people's approval, that was, in its way, for her own benefit too. She took whatever action would gain the approval of the person standing in front of her, pushing off the consequences, for the sake of assuaging her immediate peace of mind. She was not, on the whole, noble or heroic by nature. She was obsessed with her own feelings, and willing to forgive herself for any self-serving decision she made because she justified it by blowing her own emotions out of proportion as though they were the end-all, be-all, measure of the world.

And it hadn't made her any happier. She knew that -- she was struggling with it in her civilian life, trying to figure out how to make sense of her superficial relationship with her parents. She'd woken from her coma desperate to feel free, not to waste her life living for someone else's wishes.

But she hadn't considered that it hadn't made Tara any happier either, her self-servingness. She hadn't considered how cruel it was to put every emotional burden on her friends, to take advantage of them as she had. Poor Tara -- her Tara, who'd stuck by her even when she was half-dead for a year -- had been trying to fight a battle alone. She'd been trying to protect Laney from it... because that's what Laney had always expected her to do.

Tara had been so convinced that it was her role to sacrifice her own well-being for Laney's, she'd spent however long until now being a shield for her even when Laney didn't know she was doing it. She was so convinced that this was her responsibility that here she was apologizing for failing.

Laney had not been a good friend at all.

"That was never your job," she mumbled into Aquarius's shoulder. "Never."

Hvergelmir followed her friend inside, this time already subconsciously gearing herself up for more wondrousness. She continued to have failed to recognize Aquarius's injury, but at least Aquarius was holding onto her, and not vice versa, so she probably wasn't worsening it, either.

Whatever she expected, she was impressed even so. Around them was a receiving room of some kind, decorated lightly for guests, and it showed equal signs of disarray and attempts to set it to order. The floors were unevenly clean, clear in sections and with dust near the outer bounds of the room in a way that suggested either heavy, recent foot traffic or else an abortive cleaning attempt, equally recent. Where the floor had been wiped clear, however, was a glimmering tile mosaic floor of such surpassing artistry that the blue water depicted in the mosaic nearly seemed to flow underfoot. Lonely, one-person outpost this may have been, but it was obviously also a place in which the architect had taken the utmost pride. "Tara," she marveled, turning a half-circle to admire the whole of the room, "this place is . . . amazing. Seriously. Just . . . wow. Your Bat Cave is phenomenal."

Hvergelmir hadn't seen the half of it yet -- but she had no way of knowing that. To her, the antechamber alone was worth the entrance fee.